Use Proxmox VE To Turn Your Old Computer Into A Virtual Machine Server

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If you are a computer geek like me, chances are you have a few computers lying around just collecting dust. Why not put them to good use and create a virtual machine server out of them?

You could install Ubuntu or CentOS, setup VirtualBox and configure some virtual machines and waste time configuring scripts; or you could install Proxmox VE, setup some virtual machines and be done with it. Proxmox VE is an open-source, Linux based, virtualization platform. It is free to use and very simple to install. Just download the Proxmox VE ISO, burn it to a disk, and run the setup on your machine. Installation only takes about 3-5 minutes and it is very easy to add virtual machines and appliances. Just login to the web interface from any computer on the network and upload an operating system image to the Proxmox VE system. They also make it easy to install an appliance from one of their virtual appliance templates.

Another thing that is really great about Proxmox VE is clustering. Thats right… clustering. With Proxmox VE you can setup multiple servers on the network and put them in a cluster to provide centralized web management for all the servers. With clustering, you can also move virtual machine instances from one server to another to another to another and so on to get the optimal configuration and the most performance out of your hardware.

Oh, and BTW, you can also schedule backups of your virtual machines.